Intimate Friends by Lydia Syson

Today I want to celebrate the birthday of Frédéric Bazille, who was born on December 6th in Montpellier in 1841.  A medical student turned painter, who wore wonderful checked trousers, he was at the heart of the circle of artists who became the Impressionists. He volunteered to fight in the Franco-Prussian war and was killed by a sniper's bullet on 28th November 1870 in the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande during a disastrous attempt to relieve the Siege of Paris.  If you've never heard of him, that's why.

Portrait of Fréderic Bazille by Etienne Carat, 1865

Here he is in 1867, full of concentration at his easel, one red-ribboned, espadrille'd foot curling gently over the other.  He was a tall young man, as you'll see. This painting is by Renoir.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Frédéric Bazille
1867
Oil on canvas
H. 105; W. 73.5 cm
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

On the wall behind Bazille's head hangs a snow scene by Monet. (See yesterday's post by Joan Lennon for more on snowy landscapes.) A fourth friend who shared the studio, out of sight in the image above, was tackling the same still life at the same time. Here's what Alfred Sisley painted.

Alfred Sisley, Heron with Outstretched Wings, 1867
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

Here's Bazille's version.  Presumably Sisley decided to leave out the fourth avian corpse.

Bazille, The Heron, 1867, Private Collection

And at some point the same year, Bazille produced this portrait of Renoir:

   

Bazille, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1867, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Unstudied and informal, Renoir's rakish pose reveals not just his elastic-sided boots (something I learned from the sumptuous exhibition catalogue in which I first came across the picture: Impressionism, Fashion & Modernity, The Art Insitute of Chicago, 2012) but also, perhaps, something about the friendship that existed between the two artists.  I've looked at this painting a lot, though only in reproduction.  It lives in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, where an exhibition devoted to Bazille and his place in Impressionism will open next summer. It made me very curious about the relationship between Renoir and Bazille.  

Bazille, Scène d'été, 1869, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

Like his distinctly homo-erotic Summer Scene (above), which Bazille painted two years later, and his Fisherman with a Net (below), Bazille's painting of his friend fed into my thinking while I was writing Liberty's Fire and trying to clarify the relationship between two young men, one rich, one poor - just like Bazille and Renoir, as I now discover - sharing an apartment in Paris in 1871. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault identified 1870 as the year in which the concept of homosexuality was 'invented' - although obviously I'm giving you a drastic oversimplification of a much-debated and often-quoted argument - and I found myself wondering about the relationship between this and the emerging figure of the 'flâneur'.  What might it have been like to have been gay at a period when this was just beginning to be conceptualised as an identity, I wondered, in a country where it wasn't a crime?  I didn't know then that 2015 would turn out to be the year of LGBT novels for Young Adults, but I had been concerned that this was an aspect of diversity that certainly doesn't often feature in YA historical fiction.   

Bazille, The Fisherman with a Net, 1868,
Foundation Rau pour le Tiers-Monde, Zurich, Switzerland

When I realised that my last History Girls posting date of 2016 fell on Bazille's birthday, I was full of good intentions.  I'd investigate further, I decided, and find out (if I possibly could) whether Bazille really did have unreciprocated feelings for Renoir as his paintings had led me to suspect.  I'd find out more about his political views, and also about the incident during the Paris Commune when Renoir, out painting en plein air, was nearly executed as a spy, but his life was saved by Raoul Rigault.  But time has run away with me. Writing deadlines. Teaching. Christmas coming. I've left it too late.  I'm very sorry. I've made very little progress with this and all I can do today is leave you with these thoughts and one more enticing image.  

Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870), Edouard Manet (1832-1883)
Bazille's Studio
1870
Oil on Canvas
H. 98; W. 128.5 cm
© RMN-Grand Palais-Grand Palais-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Bazille - the tall, gangly figure standing by the painting on the easel near the centre - was actually painted in by Manet.  Bazille has painted Manet wearing a hat and standing in front of the canvas. Monet is thought to be standing behind him, if he isn't the young man looking down from the stairs, who might be Zola.  On the far left, the artist sitting on the table with one foot swinging could be Sisley or Renoir. At the piano is their friend, patron and companion at the Café Guerbois, Edmond Maître, who was devastated by Bazille's death later that year, and wrote: 'Of all the young people I've known, Bazille was the most gifted and likeable.'  

 

IT'S YOU AGAIN by Lydia Syson

Coming to the end of every book I’ve written, I always find myself regretting that I’ve not had more time to get to know some of the people I’ve encountered on the way.  It’s a bit like all those unfinished or unhad or too-fleeting conversations you’re left with at the end of a good party – there are always other guests you wish you’d spent more time with, or who vanished just as someone promised to introduce you.  And you hope to run into them again.

The funny thing is how often you do.  So it has been with the Vizetelly family, who popped up last month in Michael Rosen’s Radio 3 beguiling Sunday Feature, ‘Zola in Norwood’.

This programme told the story of the French novelist’s period of exile in England in 1898-9 when he fled in cognito to escape persecution during the Dreyfus affair, and Ernest Vizetelly looked after him.  As well as a familiar South London landscape – one painted by Pisarro when he fled France to avoid fighting in the Franco-Prussian war nearly twenty years earlier - I enjoyed the voices of two actors I’ve loved since my teens – Anton Lesser (I first saw him in an unforgettable Hamlet in 1982 at the Donmar Warehouse and fifteen year olds never forget) and Harriet Walter (who stood out the same year in All’s Well That Ends Well) – not to mention the radio drama debut of the brilliant translator Sarah Ardizzone, who was also responsible for a shocking, never-before translated passage you can hear from the novel Zola wrote in London, Fecundity.  But I’m digressing already.

Reproduced from BBC website

Ernest Vizetelly was the slightly less brilliant translator and editor who took the photograph above - Zola is hard at work on the manuscript of Fecondité - and who told this story himself in a book speedily published in 1899: With Zola in England: a story of exile. (He assures readers he only undertook the task just in case circumstances prevented Zola from getting round to telling the story himself.)  His father Henry, the first publisher of Zola’s novels in English, suffered three months in prison and bankruptcy following an obscenity trial in 1889 which centred on his publication of The Soil (La Terre), branded by the solicitor-general as a work of ‘bestial obscenity’, after which Ernest took over the reins.  He brought out Zola’s later works in translation as fast as Zola could write them, editing them heavily for his own safety as he did so.  That landmark moment in the history of literary censorship is another story – summarised extremely well here and well worth exploring, not least for the light it casts on what I'm about to tell you about Ernest.

I first came across the Vizetelly family from two directions at once, and I still can’t quite work out quite what to make of the ever enterprising Ernest.  Unsurprisingly, the novels of Zola were an incredibly rich source for me while writing Liberty’s Fire, which is set during the Paris Commune of 1871. I shamelessly pillaged the extraordinarily detailed descriptions of Les Halles in The Belly of Paris, backstage life in Nana and the laundries and pawn tickets of The Assommoir, never mind the final scenes of The Debacle.  (I thoroughly recommend Colette Wilson's gripping analysis of how Zola’s novels relate to his experience of the Commune Paris and the Commune, 1871-78: the Politics of Forgetting.  As this review rightly observes, one of her book’s strengths lies in the decision to look at the clear presence of the Commune even in works that did not directly address l’année terrible.) But though these are the out-of-copyright freebies that pop up on Kindle, I quickly realised that I was best off avoiding all Vizetelly translations, senior and junior.  This is partly because of the expurgations (despite Henry’s resistance to ‘bowdlerising . . .the greatest works in English Literature' I believe he was cautious even before the disastrous trial, although I may be wrong) but mainly because they’re really not very well written.  They seem to me dashed off, dated, and fairly clunky in style.  I became slightly obsessed with tracking down the very best alternatives, which was how I discovered Mark ‘Cod’ Kurlansky’s brilliant version of The Belly of Paris and also Lydia Davis’ Madame Bovary. (And discovered this useful resource.)

But back to those Vizetellys, of whom there were many – grandfathers, uncles, brothers and cousins, newspapermen and wine connoisseurs, printers and war correspondents and even a well-known lexicographer.  This is what old Ernest looked like in 1914, when he finally published his own accounts of first the Franco-Prussian war and the Siege of Paris, and then of the Commune itself. 

Frontispiece to My Days of Adventure

How I wish I knew what he looked like in 1871.  At this point he was a seventeen-year-old junior reporter, rushing around revolutionary Paris with his father and brother, gathering material for the Illustrated London News.  He reminds me of a character from a G.A.Henty novel, politics included, and I can imagine his exploits inspiring awe in boys like Oswald Bastable - though I'm sure Noel would have had reservations.  Residents of the French capital since 1865, Ernest and his father were as talented at drawing and engraving as they were at journalism.  They were besieged during the Franco-Prussian war and dispatched their reports back to England by balloon-post, making the most of the quickly developing art of photography to send the pictures of their pictures and copy in duplicate by successive posts to be certain of delivery.  A decade later, in the book Paris in Peril (1882), father and son collaborated in a vivid portrayal of life in beleaguered France during the war, but dealt with the Commune and its terrible demise in just a few condemnatory paragraphs: ‘The reprisals were certainly terrible; but the provocation had been very great. The Commune was crushed.’

Ernest returned to the themes in 1914, publishing in separate volumes My Days ofAdventure: The Fall of France, 1870-71 and then, just after the outbreak of World War I, My Adventures in the Commune.  The title is misleading.  Consummate journalist as he is by then, elderly Ernest rarely clear makes the difference between his own adventures and those of others.  Although he criticises other reporters who cheerfully sent alarmist dispatches about certain events (like the destruction of the Vendôme column) before they even happened, he is pretty cagy about what he actually witnessed himself and what material he draws from other sources, let alone what those sources might be.

Engraving by Arthur Boyd Houghton

This is a boy who learned his journalistic skills and nous at the knee of a father who in his own autobiography cheerfully confessed authorship of one of the great travel hoaxes of the nineteenth century: Four months among the gold-finders in Alta California, being the Diary of an Expedition from San Francisco to the Gold Districts supposedly by J. Tyrwitt Brooks, (M.D.).  Henry Vizetelly concocted the fantastic adventures of a mythical gold-hunter in the hitherto unknown foothills of the Sierra Nevada so convincingly that he was hailed by The Times in 1849 as ‘a gentleman who knows all about it!’  After all, how many people could actually contradict him? 

Ernest’s family nickname was ‘The Eel’.  When writing about Louise Michel, probably the best known of the Communardes then and now, and famed in the political clubs held in so many churches in Paris, he is certainly slippery:

Louise Michel in the uniform of the
National Guard, Paris' citizen militia,
guardians of the Commune

‘If I remember rightly, I once heard Louise Michel speak at the club held in the church of Saint-Jacques.  I have referred previously to this so-called Red Virgin of the Commune. . .Towards the end of the Empire she began to pay attention to public questions, and expressed the most advanced political and social views. [NB ‘advanced’ is not exactly a compliment here, as you’ll see in a moment.]  At the advent of the Commune she was almost swept away by enthusiastic fervour.  I can picture her as a woman of eight-and-thirty, with an angular figure, a pale face with prominent cheekbones, a large mouth, and dark glowing eyes.  She assumed the uniform of the National Guards, participated in more than one of the sorties, and was wounded whilst assisting in the defence of the much-bombarded Fort of Issy. . .’

There’s nothing to suggest that young Ernest ever actually set eyes on either Louise Michel or three other Communardes he says frequented this particular political club.  But he’s happy to paint them in the grotesquely stereotyped terms which characterise so many such accounts by writers hostile to the Commune, borrowing the scandalous reputations of these women to colour ‘his’ adventures.  Ernest describes one woman, just as if he’d seen her,

Engraving by Arthur Boyd Houghton

‘who. . . during the Bloody Week [the week in which the Commune was brutally crushed by Government army, leaving as many as 20,000 dead on the streets of Paris]. . .went about, sword in hand, in a state of hysterical fury, which she strove to assuage by decapitating any corpses that she saw lying in the streets, and this although they were for the most part those of National Guards. At the club this creature raved frantically, her face wearing the while much the same expression as that which may be observed on the countenances of militant suffragettes when they are hurling choice imprecations at police-magistrates and others.  She was doubtless of much the same breed – the breed of the possédées de Loudun [possessed nuns made famous in a 17^th century witchcraft trial] and the convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard.  Among her club-companions was a former fortune-teller who was almost as violent, and an ex-ragpicker who, perhaps, even surpassed her as a virago. This woman, called, I believe Marie Gougeard, attended the assassination of several of the hostages . . . and as the vicims fell to the ground lifeless, waved a red flag and shrieked, “Vive la Commune!”’

From The Communists of Paris, 1871: Types,
Physiognomies, Characters by Bertall

The working women of the Commune get a pretty bad press from Ernest throughout his narrative, though he does attempt an odd version of gallantry, insisting that the fires which raged through Paris were, contrary to rumour, mostly the work of men rather than women. The pétroleuses -  ‘hundreds of women wandering about with their little supplies of mineral oil, and setting fire to one and another place in a haphazard way, are gross exaggerations’ - he dismisses as a legend nurtured by imaginative journalists. Yet discussing a vast explosion at a cartridge factory, whose cause has never determined, he says it can’t possibly have been caused by a Government shell:  ‘It was due, probably to the carelessness of one or another of the scores of women who were employed in the works.’  Of course Ernest was hardly alone in his attitudes to women: such views were obviously widespread at the time.  But it’s a pity that a hundred years and more later, historians of the period such as Alastair Horne and Rupert Christiansen continue to trot out the most misogynistic and formulaic portraits of the Communardes without qualm or query. 

In the preface to My Adventures, Ernest assures us that he has drawn on his diaries of 1871.  There are certainly moments when the narrative comes alive and you sense he really was there.  It’s easy, for example, to picture this nimble teenager sliding through the crowds to get to the front as the Emperor-topped column in the Place Vendôme came crashing to the ground:

‘I do not remember whether my father and my brother followed me, but, eel-like, and in spite of the fact that some of the Commune’s “cavalry” rode up to hold the crowd in check, I wriggled through the throng, and at last, on a great bed of dung, I perceived the French Caesar lying prone – decapitated by his fall, and with one arm broken.’

From My Adventures in the Commune

Other stories, particularly about the final days of the Commune, also ring true.  He records meeting a plumber at the Gare Saint Lazare who is trying to get home to a wife about to give birth.  Just at that moment, they are caught in crossfire, and the shot proves fatal for this man.  He and his brother and father were on the Place de la Concorde at the moment when the arcaded façade of the Ministry of Finance collapsed in flames and they had to run for their lives, stopping only to pick up a few of the hundreds of charred and burning documents that began to rain down on the area.  I certainly drew on Ernest’s description of watching Government forces as they attacked on the Elysée Palace (used by Napoleon III to meet his mistresses) during the last ‘Bloody’ week of the Commune’s existence.  Many of the most enduring images of the Commune are photographs – barricades before the final week, ruins afterwards, but when it came to the fighting and action shots, camera technology still lagged behind the speed of the pencil.  Ernest knew how to get the images the Illustrated London News was after:

‘From the 6^th floor balcony of the house in the Rue de Miromesnil where I was living with my father and my brother Arthur, one could see a part of the palace, notably the guard-house at the corner of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Avenue de Marigny.  Awakened at a very early hour by the sounds of firing, we repaired to the balcony in question.  We were the only tenants in the house, the Chateaubriand family, which had left Paris before the German siege, not having returned since thern.  The sixth-floor rooms were chiefly occupied by their servants, but the concierge of the house had a key which procured us admission to some soubrette’s little chamber, whence we speedily reached the balcony.  From that point of vantage, as from the gallery of a theatre, we looked down upon an episode in the great tragedy of war.  I had brough a sketch-block with me, and resting it on the balcony railing, after taking a chair, I was able to make in all comfort a sketch of the defence of the Elysée guard house, which the soldiers were attacking.”

(You’ll notice Ernest dismissively sexualises even the absent maid whose room he invades.  Perhaps he would have done the same at the age of seventeen.  But something makes me hope not.)  On this occasion, he had plenty of time to observe the military operations, for it took quite some time.  First “the soldiers had to carry a mansion belonging to one of the Rothschilds where a considerable party of insurgents had, so to say, entrenched themselves.  Moreover, all the movements of the military were very cautious.  They glided along the house-fronts, took refuge in every recess, stole into houses and fired from garret-windows and roofs, seldome, during the whole of the street-fighting, carrying a barricade by direct assault. . . . The end of the affair came, I remember, very suddenly.  The attention of the insurgents was still directed towards the lower part of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, whence they were being attacked, when all at once a body of troops came stealthily but rapidly along the Avenue de Marigny.  By this means the Communalists were taken in the rear and all chance of escape was cut off.  A few men who tried to resist were at once shot down.  The rest dropped their weapons and surrendered.  The same kind of thing occurred repeatedly during the street-fighting.  The insurgents were outmanoeuvred, outflanked; and even their biggest barricades, bristling with ordnance, were of no avail to them. 

‘Paris had changed since 1848.  Here and there, of course, as is the case even today, some narrow and more or less winding streets still remained, but the greater part of the city offered nothing like the same facilities for defence as had been the case in pre-Haussmanite days.’ 

In 1967, a Chichester wine merchant called Russell Purchase was interested enough in Henry Vizetelly to track down Ernest’s son Victor, who gathered together the family letters, photographs, drawings and other memorabilia so that Purchase could write a biography.  Purchase died before he could finish it, and all this material is now fills 17 boxes in the University of Sussex Library.  One day, when I have time, I may not be able to resist going to look at it so that I can meet Ernest again.  Of course what I'm really hoping for is a photograph or sketch of his adventurous seventeen-year-old self.

(You can find more background on the Paris Commune in this post I wrote last November, and you probably haven't heard the last of it yet. . .)

A HUNGRY CHRISTMAS By Eleanor Updale

Merry Christmas, everyone.  I hope you are enjoying a stupendous feast today.  Of course, this year -perhaps more than most -  people are going hungry because of sickness or conflict.  So I thought I’d take a look at one such Christmas, if only to give us all a break from that 1914 football match which seems to have taken over all media outlets this week.

From September 1870 to January 1871, Paris was under siege by Prussian forces.  Almost fifty thousand civilians died, many of them through starvation. 

Several foreigners were trapped in Paris when the Prussians swooped and, fortunately for us, an English language account of conditions in the city was published shortly after the war.  Henry Labouchere, a wealthy British journalist and former MP sent regular reports to his mistress during the war, and brought them together to form The Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris, published in 1872.

All the railways had been disabled, and the roads were blocked, so the only way to get letters out was by carrier pigeon or hot air balloon.  The useless railway stations at the Gare du Nord and the Gare d’Orleans were transformed into balloon factories, and by the end of 1870, a daring postal service with fees and collection routines had been established, and Labouchere made extensive use of it.

Here is part of  Labouchere’s account of Christmas Day, 1870

We are not having a “merry Christmas” and we are not likely to have a happy new year. Christmas is not here the great holiday of the year, as it is in England.  Still, everyone in ordinary times tries to have a better dinner than usual, and usually where there are children in a family some attempt is made to amuse them… Since the Empire introduced English ways here, plum-pudding and mince pies have been eaten, and even Christmas-trees have flourished. This year these festive shrubs, as an invention of the detested foe, have been rigidly tabooed. Plum-puddings and mince pies, too, will appear on few tables.  In order to comfort the children, the girls are to be given soup tickets to distribute to beggars, and the boys are to have their choice between French and German wooden soldiers.  The former treasured up, the latter will be subjected to fearful tortures.  Even the midnight mass, which is usually celebrated on Christmas-Eve, took place in very few churches last night.

And he spoke of his fellow ex-pats:

The English here are making feeble attempts to celebrate Christmas correctly.  In an English restaurant, two turkeys had been treasured up for the important occasion, but unfortunately a few days ago they anticipated their fate, and most ill-naturedly insisted upon dying.  One fortunate Briton has got ten pounds of camel, and has invited about twenty of his countrymen to aid him in devouring this singular substitute for turkey.  Another gives himself airs because he has some potted turkey, which is solemnly to be consumed to-day spread on bread.  I am myself going to dine with the correspondent of one of your contemporaries.  On the same floor as himself lives a family who left Paris before the commencement of the siege.  Necessity knows no law; so the other day he opened their door with a certain amount of gentle violence, and after a diligent search, discovered in the larder two onions, some potatoes, and a ham.  These, with a fowl, which I believe has been procured honestly, are to constitute our Christmas dinner.

Did you noise the reference to camel?  This wasn’t a joke.  The citizens resorted to killing and eating the animals in the zoo - thereby addressing the two problems of how to feed them, and how to feed the human population.  For the rich, this might mean an extremely exotic Christmas dinner.  Here is the menu for one:

You will note the references to rats, kangaroo, and to ‘Elephant consommé.  The zoo's two crowd-pulling Elephants Castor and Pollux had been killed for food.

The killing of Pollux and Castor - Illustrated London News

Eventually, Labouchere got to taste them:

Yesterday, I had a slice of Pollux for dinner.  Pollux and his brother Castor are two elephants which have been killed.  It was tough, coarse, and oily, and I do not recommend English families to eat elephant as long as they can get beef or mutton.

It is clear that, for a price, rich people could still eat.  But Labouchere, for all his wealth, was aware of the plight of the  poor:

It is very strange what opposite opinions one hears about the condition of the poor.  Some persons say that there is no distress, others that it cannot be greater.  The fact is, the men were never better off, the women and children never so badly off.  Every man can have enough to eat and too much to drink by dawdling about with a gun.  As his home is cold and cheerless, when he is not on duty he lives at a pothouse.  He brings no money to his wife and children, who consequently only just keep body and soul together by going to the national cantinas, where they get soup, and to the Mairies, where they occasionally get an order for bread.  Almost all their clothes are in pawn, so how it is they do not positively die of cold I cannot understand.

As for fuel, even the wealthy find it difficult to procure it.  The Government talks of cutting down all the trees and of giving up all the clothes in pawn; but, with its usual procrastination, it puts off both these measure from day to day. 

Labouchere’s account is lively and amusing.  It’s hard not to take to him as you read.  

Some years after the siege, he returned to Parliament, and campaigned against fraud and corruption in public life.  However he was also profoundly opposed to women’s suffrage, and is credited/blamed, for the parliamentary amendment which outlawed consensual homosexual acts.  He lived in Pope’s Villa at Twickenham - rebuilt in High Victorian style, and still a splendid sight from the river today.  

So we know that he recovered from his plight, but even so, It’s hard not to pity him, today of all days, when he wrote this, four days after Christmas 1870:

At my hotel, need I observe that I do not pay my bill, but in hotels the guests may ring in vain now for food. I sleep on credit in a  gorgeous bed, a pauper,  The room is large,  I wish it were smaller, for the firewood comes from trees just cut down, and it takes an hour to get the logs to light, and then they only smoulder, and emit no heat.  The thermometer in my grand room, with its silken curtains, us usually at freezing point.  Then my clothes - I am seedy, very seedy. When I call upon a friend the porter eyes me distrustfully.  In the streets the beggars never ask me for alms; on the contrary, they eye me suspiciously when I approach them, as a possible competitor…As for my linen, I will only say that the washerwomen have struck work, as they have no fuel…For my food…Cat, dog, rat and horse are very well as novelties, but habitually, they do not assimilate with my inner man. 

Whatever the less attractive aspects of Labouchere's character, today of all days we should rejoice that when the siege ended, he got away to Versailles:

I am not intoxicated, but I feel so heavy from having imbibed during the last twenty-four hours more milk than I did during the first six months which I passed in this planet, that I have some difficulty in collection my thoughts in order to write a letter.  Yesterday I arrived here in order to breathe for a moment the air of freedom.  In vain, my hospitable friends, who have put me up, have offered me wine to drink, and this and that delicacy to eat - I have stuck to eggs, butter, and milk.  Patts of butter I have bolted with a greediness which would have done honour to Pickwick’s fat boy.

Which brings us back to a more traditional view of Christmas.  And here in your cracker is Mr Wardle's song from The Pickwick Papers.  Just to cheer things back up:

     But my song I troll out, for Christmas Stout,
     The hearty, the true, and the bold;
     A bumper I drain, and with might and main
     Give three cheers for this Christmas old!
     We'll usher him in with a merry din
     That shall gladden his joyous heart,
     And we'll keep him up, while there's bite or sup,
     And in fellowship good, we'll part.
     In his fine honest pride, he scorns to hide
     One jot of his hard-weather scars;
     They're no disgrace, for there's much the same trace
     On the cheeks of our bravest tars.
     Then again I sing till the roof doth ring
     And it echoes from wall to wall—
     To the stout old wight, fair welcome to-night,
     As the King of the Seasons all!

Merry Christmas!

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